Social media protocol - guide for users
Our main corporate social media channels are listed below:
These accounts are monitored by the communications team in office hours.
We generally work between 8:30am and 5:30pm from Monday to Friday.
Outside of these hours, including at weekends and on Bank Holidays, our accounts are not monitored unless one of the team is:
- covering an evening meeting
- in an emergency situation
- involved in a corporate event
Our corporate accounts
Our Twitter/X is a feed of:
- council news
- updates and promotions of council services
- events and policies
It also includes re-tweets from other council service accounts and partners, and answers to your questions.
The Facebook account is updated less often and concentrates on council news and events.
Whilst we act on and responded to, complaints made via social media are not officially logged.
If you would like to make a formal complaint, see our complaints page.
We answer questions and queries via both Facebook and Twitter/X. However in emergency or crisis situations you should check Twitter/X. This will be used as our key communication channel, alongside our website.
Response policy
- at times of emergency we may not be able to respond to individual messages straight away due to the volume we receive. We will focus on sending important updates and updating our website
- most questions will require us to consult other departments, so please bear with us whilst we do this. We aim to respond within 48 office hours
- we do not discuss private or sensitive information over social media so may ask to take the conversation offline
- where we are uncertain about a particular issue, we may link in other third parties who may provide you with more information e.g. the Police and other blue-light services, health partners or other councils
Help us to help you
- if you are tweeting us to report an issue, please check our Report it page first, it has a variety of online forms where people can report issues
- if you do not wish to do this, please be specific about the issue, where it is, and provide as many details as possible. A photo of a piece of litter on the pavement with no location details does not help us to help you
We will respond to
- clear questions about our services and policies
- general enquiries
- reports about our services
We may not respond to
- vague/general statements
- insults
- repetitive aggression
- inappropriate comments
- repetitive questioning by an individual once original question has been replied to
House Rules
- no obscene language or language that demonstrates discriminatory, racist, abusive or unlawful behaviour. We reserve the right to block such users as a result
- please do not publish pictures of our staff, their names or their contact details on social media. If you would like to make a formal complaint about a member of staff, you can do so via our complaints process.
- threatening / aggressive language or behaviour towards staff will be warned and then blocked
A number of our services also have social media accounts. A list of these can be found on our Social media page.